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Frank Belknap Long
Frank Belknap Long (April 27, 1901 - January 3, 1994) was an American poet and a prolific writer of horror, fantasy, science fiction, gothic romance, comic books, and non-fiction. Life Overview Long's writing career spanned 7 decades. He is best known for his horror and science fiction stories, including early contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos. Youth and education Long was born in New York City, and grew up in the Harlem area of Manhattan. His father was a prosperous dentist and his mother was May Doty. The family resided at 823 West End Avenue in Manhattan. A lifelong resident of New York City, Long was educated in the city's public school system. As a boy he was fascinated by natural history, and wrote that he wanted to runn "away from home and explore the great rain forests of the Amazon." He developed his interest in the weird by reading the Oz books, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells. Though writing was to be his life's work, he once commented that as "important as writing is, I could have been completely happy if I had a secure position in a field that has always had a tremendous emotion and an imaginative appeal for me—that of natural history." In his late teens, he was active in the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA) in which he won a prize from The Boy's World (around 1919) and thus discovered amateur journalism. His first published tale was "Dr Whitlock's Price (United Amateur, March 1920). Long's story "The Eye Above the Mantel" (1921) in UAPA caught the eye of H.P. Lovecraft, sparking a friendship and correspondence that would endure until Lovecraft's death in 1937. Long attended New York University from 1920 to 1921, studying journalism but later transferred to Columbia, leaving without a degree. In 1921, he suffered a severe attack of appendicitis, leading to a ruptured appendix and peritonitis. He spent a month in New York's Roosevelt Hospital, where he came close to dying. Long's brush with death propelled him into a decision that he would leave college to pursue a freelance writing career. Career In 1923, at the age of 22, Long sold his first short story, "The Desert Lich", to Weird Tales magazine. Throughout the next 4 decades, Long was to be a frequent contributor to pulp magazines, including 2 of the most famous: Weird Tales (under editor Farnsworth Wright) and Astounding Science Fiction (under editor John W. Campbell). Long was an active freelance writer, also publishing many non-fiction articles. His 1st book, the scarce volume A Man from Genoa, and other poems, was published in 1926. His second published book was also a volume of fantastic poetry: The Goblin Tower, 1928. In the late 1930s, Long turned his hand to science fiction, writing for Astounding Science Fiction. He also contributed horror stories to Unknown, later called Unknown Worlds. His later science fiction works include the story collection John Carstairs, Space Detective (1949), and the novels Space Station 1 (1957), Mars is My desination (1962) and It Was the Day of the Robot (1963). In pulps such as Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories during the 1940s, Long sometimes wrote using the pseudonym 'Leslie Northern.' What Long characterized as a "minor disability" kept him out of World War II and writing full time during the early 1940s. He also wrote comic books in the 1940s , including horror stories for Adventures Into the Unknown (ACG), and scripts for Planet Comics, Superman, Congo Bill, DC's Golden Age Green Lantern, and the Fawcett Comics Captain Marvel. Ever versatile as a writer, Long changed with the times. In the 1950s he was uncredited associate editor on The Saint Mystery Magazine and Fantastic Universe. He was associate editor on Satellite Science Fiction, 1959; on Short Stories, 1959-60; and on Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine until 1966. After the decline of the pulps, he moved into writing science fiction and gothic romance novels (and even a Man from UNCLE story The Electronic Frankenstein Affair, which appeared under the pen name Robert Hart Davis in the Man from UNCLE Magazine). "The Horror from the Hills" (1963), a well-known Long story, was based on a dream related to him by Lovecraft. Long wrote 9 modern Gothic novels, starting with So Dark a Heritage in 1966 (published under his own name), 8 of which were published as by 'Lyda Belknap Long' (a combination of his wife (Lyda Arco Long)'s name and his middle name and surname). All were entirely his own work and were workmanlike products intended to support him and his wife rather than to be of high literary quality. According to Elsa J. Radcliffe, Crucible of Evil (1974) is "a very clumsy tale both in plot and writing style. Much of the suspense seems contrived and the plot tediously simplistic." Elsa J. Radcliffe. Gothic Novels of the Twentieth Century: An Annotated Bibliography. Metuchen NJ/London: Scarecrow Press, 1979, p. 131. Long also published collections of his short stories (such as The Hounds of Tindalos and Night Fear) and poetry (including In Mayan Splendor); a biography of Lovecraft, Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the nightside; and his own Autobiographical Memoir (Necronomicon Press, 1986). Illumination on his own life and work is also provided by his introduction to The Early Long (1975), a collection of his best early stories. He married Lyda Arco,a Russian descended from a line of actors in the Yiddish theatre who ran a salon in Chelsea, NY, in 1960. They stayed together till Long's death in 1994, but had no children. Long described himself as an "agnostic." Referring to Lovecraft, Long wrote that he "always shared HPL's skepticism . . . concerning the entire range of alleged supernatural occurrences and what is commonly defined as 'the occult.'" Long died on January 3, 1994 at the age of 92, survived by his wife, Lyda. Despite a 7-decade career as a writer, he had died impoverished after many years living in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. Due to his poverty, he was interred in a potter's field for indigents. Friends and colleagues, on learning of this indignity, had his remains moved and reinterred at New York City's Woodlawn Cemetery, in a family plot near that of Lovecraft's grandparents. Long's fans contributed over $3000 to have his name engraved upon the tombstone of his family plot. His wife died shortly after and her ashes were scattered on his grave. Writing Frank Belknap Long left behind a body of work that included twenty-nine novels, 150 short stories, eight collections of short stories, three poetry collections, and numerous freelance magazine articles and comic book scripts. Author Ray Bradbury summed up Long's career: "Frank Belknap Long has lived through a major part of science fiction history in the U.S., has known most of the writers personally, or has corresponded with them, and has, with his own writing, helped shape the field when most of us were still in our early teens." H.P. Lovecraft was a close friend and mentor to Long, with whom he came in contact in 1920 when Long was 19. Lovecraft found Long a stimulating correspondent especially in regard to his aesthetic tastes, focussing on the Italian Renaissance and French literature. Lovecraft published some of Long's early work in his Conservative (e.g. Felis: A prose Poem 1923, about Long's pet cat) and paid tribute to Long in a flattering article, "The Work of Frank Belknap Long, Jun.," published anonymously in the United Amateur (May 1924) but clearly by Lovecraft. They first met when Lovecraft visited New York in April 1922. They saw each other with great frequency (especially during Lovecraft's Brooklyn residence in New York City from 1924 to 1926), at which time they were the chief members of the Kalem Club and wrote to each other often. Long's family apartment was always Lovecraft's residence and headquarters during his periodic trips from Providence to New York. Long writes that he and Lovecraft exchanged "more than a thousand letters, not a few running to more than eighty handwritten pages" before Lovecraft's death in 1937. Some of their correspondence has been reprinted in Arkham House's Selected Letters series, collecting the voluminous correspondence of Lovecraft and his friends. Long's Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Night Side was extensively edited by James Turner. During the 1930s, Long and Lovecraft were both members of the Kalem Club (named for the initials of the surnames of original members—K, L, or M). Long was also part of the loosely associated "Lovecraft Circle" of fantasy writers (along with Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, Clark Ashton Smith, C.M. Eddy, Jr., and Donald Wandrei) who corresponded regularly with each other and influenced and critiqued each other's works. Long wrote a brief preface to the stillborn edition of Lovecraft's The Shunned House (1928). Lovecraft, in turn, ghostwrote for Long the preface to Mrs William B. Symmes' Old World Footprints (W. Paul Cook/The Recluse Press, 1928), a slim poetry collection by Long's aunt. Long's short novel The Horror from the Hills (Weird Tales, Jan and Feb-March 1931; published in book from 1963) incorporates verbatim a letter by Lovecraft recounting his great 'Roman dream' of Hallow'een 1927. Long teamed with Lovecraft in a revision service with Lovecraft in 1928. Long's parents frequently took Lovecraft on various motor trips between 1929 and 1930, and Lovecraft visited Long at Christmas between 1932 and 1935 inclusive. Lovecraft helped set type for Long's second poetry collection, The Goblin Tower (1935), correcting some of Long's faulty metre in the process. Lovecraft's letters to Long after 1931 have all been lost, with the letters up to that date existing primarily in transcriptions prepared by Arkham House. Long wrote a number of early Cthulhu Mythos stories. These included "The Hounds of Tindalos" (the first Mythos story written by anyone other than Lovecraft), The Horror from the Hills (which introduced the elephantine Great Old One Chaugnar Faugn to the Mythos), and "The Space-Eaters" (featuring a fictionalized HPL as its main character). A later Mythos story, "Dark Awakening", appeared in New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. The story betrays the influence of Long's pseudonymous romantic fiction, and the final paragraph was added by the editor at Long's suggestion. The Hounds of Tindalos are Long's most famous fictional creation. The Hounds were a pack of foul and incomprehensibly alien beasts "emerging from strange angles in dim recesses of non-Euclidean space before the dawn of time" (Long) to pursue travelers down the corridors of time. They could only enter our reality via angles, where they would mangle and exsanguinate their victims, leaving behind only a "peculiar bluish pus or ichor" (Long). Recognition During his life, Long received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (at the 1978 World Fantasy Convention), the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement (in 1987, from the Horror Writers Association), and the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award (1977). Long was a Guest of Honour at the Lovecraft Centennial Conference in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1990. Awards *First Fandom Hall of Fame award (1977). *World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (at the 1978 4th World Fantasy Convention), *Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement (in 1987, from the Horror Writers Association) In popular culture The Long/Lovecraft friendship was fictionalized in Peter Cannon's 1985 novel Pulptime: Being a Singular Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, Lovecraft, and the Kalem Club as if Narrated by Frank Belknap Long, Jr.. Long's Hounds of Tindalos have been used or referenced by many later Cthulu Mythos writers, including Ramsey Campbell, Lin Carter, and Brian Lumley. The "Hounds of Tindalos" have also inspired a number of metal and electronic music artists, such as Metallica, Epoch of Unlight, Edith Byron's Group, Beowulf, Fireaxe /Brian Voth, and Univers Zero, all of whom have recorded tracks based upon the story. Publications Poetry *''A Man from Genoa''. Athol, MA: W. Paul Cook, 1926. *''The Goblin Tower''. Cassia, FL: Dragon-Fly Press, 1935. **revised, New Collectors Group, 1945. (the New Collectors Group edition drops four, "When Chaugner Wakes," "Exotic Quest," "West Indies" and "Martial: The Vacationist" and adds three, "The Prophet," "Prediction" and "Walt Whitman") *''On Reading Arthur Machen''. Pengrove: Dog and Duck Press, 1949. *''The Marriage of Sir John de Mandeville''. Roy A. Squires, 1976. *''When Chaugnar Wakes'' (chapbook). Fantome Press, 1978. *''In Mayan Splendor''. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1977. *''The Darkling Tide: Previously uncollected poetry'' (edited by Perry M. Grayson). Tsathoggua Press, 1995.Frank Belknap Long, Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Web, Mar. 13, 2013. Novels *''Space Station No 1''. New York: Ace Books, 1957. *''Woman from Another Planet''. Chicago: Chariot Books, 1960. *''The Horror Expert'' (as "Frank Long"). New York: Belmont Books, 1961. *''The Mating Center''. Chicago: Chariot Books, 1961. *''Mars is my Destination''. New York: Pyramid Books, 1962. *''Three Steps Spaceward''. New York: Avalon Books, 1963. *''It was the Day of the Robot''. New York: Belmont Books, 1963. *''The Martian Visitors''. New York: Avalon Books, 1964. *''Mission to a Star''. New York: Avalon Books, 1964 [first appeared February 1958 in Satellite Science Fiction as "Mission to a Distant Star". *''So Dark a Heritage''. New York: Lancer Books, 1966. *''This Strange Tomorrow''. New York: Belmont Books, 1966. *''Lest Earth be Conquered''. New York: Belmont Books, 1966. *''The Androids''. New York: Tower Books, 1969 *''Journey into Darkness''. New York: Belmont Books, 1967. *''. . . And Others Shall be Born''. New York: Belmont Books, 1968. *''The Three Faces of Time''. New York: Tower Books, 1969. *''Monster from Out of Time''. New York: Popular Library, 1970. *''Survival World''. New York: Lancer Books, 1971. *''The Night of the Wolf''. New York: Popular Library, 1972. ;as "Lyda Belknap Long" *''To the Dark Tower''. New York: Lancer Books, 1969. *''Fire of the Witches''. New York: Popular Library, 1971. *''The Shape of Fear''. New York: Beagle Books, 1971. *''The Witch Tree''. New York: Lancer Books, 1971. *''Hour of the Deadly Nightshade'' (New York: Beagle Books, 1972) as by Lyda Belknap Long pb/ *''Legacy of Evil''. New York: Beagle Books, 1973. *''The Crucible of Evil''. New York: Avon, 1974. *''The Lemoyne Heritage''. New York: Zebra Books, 1977 Short fiction *''The Hounds of Tindalos''. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1946. (HT1) **abridged version, New York: Belmont Books, 1963. **''The Dark Beasts, and eight other stories from the Hounds of Tindalos''. New York: Belmont Books, 1964. **''The Hounds of Tindalos'' (first half of HT1). London: Panther, 1975. **''The Black Druid and other stories'' (second half of HT1). London: Panther, 1975. *''The Horror from the Hills''. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1963. (novella: first appeared January-March 1931 in Weird Tales). **London: Brown Watson, 1965. *''Odd Science Fiction''. New York: Belmont Books, 1964. *''John Carstairs: Space Detective''. New York: Frederick Fell, 1949. *''The Challenge from Beyond'' (with Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt and C.L. Moore). Washington, DC: Pennsylvania Dutch Cheese Press/A Weltschmerz Production, 1954. (round-robin story: first appeared September 1935 Fantasy Magazine). **''The Illustrated Challenge from Beyond''. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1978. *''The Rim of the Unknown''. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1972. *''The Early Long''. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1976. *''The Hounds of Tindalos''. New York: Jove/HBJ, 1978. (contents different from other iterations of the title). *''Night Fear'' (edited by Roy Torgeson). New York: Zebra Books, 1979. *''Rehearsal Night: A Short Story''. Boston, MA: Cat's God, 1981. *''Escape from Tomorrow: 3 previously unreprinted Weird Tales''. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1995. *''The Eye Above the Mantel and other stories''. West Hills, CA: Tsathoggua Press, 1995. *''The Man Who Died Twice (and three others). Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2009. Nonfiction *''Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the nightside. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1975. *''Autobiographical Memoir''. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1985. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction."Long, Frank Belknap" Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, December 29, 2012, SFE Ltd. Web, Mar. 13, 2013. Audio/video * Audio recording of author panel discussion from First World Fantasy Convention, Providence, 1975. Long's voice was preserved on a flexi-disc record of this speech issued with the fanzine Myrrdin Issue 3 (1976). The other side of the flexi-disc contains a recording of Robert Bloch's speech from the convention. See also * List of U.S. poets References * Leigh Blackmore. "On the Rim of the Unknown: A Visit with Frank and Lyda Belknap Long". Shoggoth No 1 (1992). * Peter Cannon Long Memories: Recollections of Frank Belknap Long, Stockport: British Fantasy Society, 1997. Afterword by Ramsey Campbell * Tom Collins. "Frank Belknap Long on Literature, Lovecraft and the Golden Age of 'Weird Tales'"". Twilight Zone 1, No 10 (Jan 1982) * Grayson, Perry M. "Frank Belknap Long: Fantasist of Multiple Dimensions: A Preliminary Critical & Historical Overview." * Grayson, Perry M. "Frank Belknap Long, Jr (1903-1994): Six Decades of Night Fear in the Eyes of 'The Young Man with Spectacles': A Selected Bio-bibliography". Yawning Vortex 1, No 1 (Summer 1994). * Grayson, Perry M. "Frank Belknap Long Pioneers the Unknown". Other Dimensions: The Journal of Multimedia Horror No 3 (date?). On Long's contribution to the early horror comics. * Grayson, Perry M. "Hail Francis, Lord Belknap!". Intro in Escape from Tomorrow (Necronomicon Press, 1995) * Grayson, Perry M. "The Lyda Books". Yawning Vortex 2, No 2 (Aug-Sept 1995) * Ben P. Indick. "In Memoriam: Frank Belknap Long". Lovecraft Studies No 30 (Spring 1994) * Joshi, S. T. “Frank Belknap Long: The Gods Are Dead,” chapter 6 in Emperors of Dreams: Some Notes on Weird Poetry. Sydney: P’rea Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9804625-3-1 (pbk) and ISBN 978-0-9804625-4-8 (hbk). * Joshi, S. T. "Things from the Sea: The Early Weird Fiction of Frank Belknap Long". Studies in Weird Fiction No 25 (Summer 2001). * Editors Obituary: Long, Frank Belknap, Locus v32:2 No.397 Feb 1994 * Long, Frank Belknap, The Early Long: the Hounds of Tindalos, Jove Books, 1978. * Longhorn, David. "A Short Long Life". (review of Peter Cannon's Long Memories (see above). Necrofile No 27 (Winter 1998), 19-20. * Price, Robert M (ed). Crypt of Cthulhu No 42 (1986) is a special issue devoted to Long. Notes External links ;Prose *"Johnny on the Spot" ;Audio / video *Four poems of Frank Belknap Long set to music by Ian Gayford ;Books * * *Frank Belknap Long at Amazon.com *Frank Belknap Long Bibliography (w Photo) ;About *Long, Frank Belknap in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. *Ron Breznay's The Old Masters of Horror: Frank Belknap Long * Category:1901 births Category:1994 deaths Category:20th-century novelists Category:American novelists Category:American comics writers Category:American fantasy writers Category:American horror writers Category:American poets Category:American science fiction writers Category:American short story writers Category:Cthulhu Mythos writers Category:Columbia University alumni Category:New York University alumni Category:People from Manhattan Category:Writers from New York City Category:20th-century poets Category:English-language poets Category:Poets